Charles Barron on the IDC: ‘renegade traitors’

New York City Councilman Charles Barron went off on the Independent Democratic Conference in a brief interview Monday evening following his address to a student group at the University at Albany.

Barron, a former Black Panther who in June was stomped in a closely watched Congressional primary against Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries, branded the four-member conference as “renegade traitors” for even considering an alliance with the Senate’s Republicans.

“For (the IDC) to do what they’re doing is just as bad as the others that they castigated,” Barron said, referring to the 2009-vintage Four Amigos. ” … How is it that when the Latinos do it they’re the worst traitors in the world, but when the whites do it they’re getting a pass?”

Barron recommended the Democratic party should organize against the four. “I think they should take traitors out” through primaries, he said.

Barron went on to say that Gov. Andrew Cuomo — his gubernatorial opponent in 2010, when Barron ran on the Freedom Party ticket — “should be ashamed of himself, too.” He charged that Cuomo will use the situation to flip the agenda between his more fiscally conservative and socially progressive poles.

The councilman’s address to about two dozen student in the UAlbany Science Library was an ample demonstration of why Barron is reviled by many — his remarks included fulsome comments about the late and unlamented Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and Zimbabwe’s brutal strongman Robert Mugabe — while remaining popular in his district.

Barron can be witty, folksy and charming, as in his anecdote about comments he made at a Washington, D.C., rally concerning his desire to “slap the closest white person.” That was hyperbole, he claimed, no different from his mother’s warnings that she had brought him into this world and could also take him out.